Tulip Fever

British TV director Justin Chadwick’s film debut is like a 17th Century Dutch painting — in its historic and social setting, in its lighting but also and mainly in its themes. 

The film animates the details that the young portrait painter includes in his commissioned work: the love of beauty, reverence for nature, the temptation and fear of vanity and — most of all — its reminder of man’s mortality. Here all of our rich life and all our hopes remind us of death. “First flower, first fall,” master Sandvort says of a tulip but that truth rules the lovers’ lives as well. 

Of course this historic period piece essentially reflects on today. Why else revisit the past but to understand the now. 

  The madness of the tulip investment frenzy finds ample modern parallels in Nortel, the high tech, mortgage, marijuana and real estate bubbles, not to mention the evergreen turbulent stock market. There is always some current fever to tempt the gullible and greedy to get rich quick. And as so often, the vanity that believes in such unearned advancement oft proves disastrous.   

Vanity is the film’s — and the painting genre’s —  primary target. Out of vanity Sandvort buys his beautiful orphan wife Sophia like a precious jar and out of vanity pursues his hunger for a male heir.
      It is even vain of him to presume that it was his prayer — that God preserve the newborn infant over his first wife — that prompted God to take both. If he is vain to tell his friend that he’ll dump Sophia if she’s not pregnant in six months, he is moderated by his love to keep her. Indeed, at Sophia’s ostensible pregnancy Sandvort asks Dr Sorgh to save Sophia over the child, if the choice is necessary.

Out of vanity Sandvort commissions the double painting, even after the artist clearly exposes the vanity of human wishes and security. Of course the plan backfires when the painter and Sophia Sandvort fall in love.  

Both sets of young lovers risk their passions in pursuit of the tulip fortune that would fund their escape. Both are thwarted by folly. Maria’s young man makes his fortune. Falsely assuming her infidelity, he goes to a tavern where he is robbed of it and is shanghaied into the navy and off to Africa. He leaves his pregnant lover in the dark. (Well, in the even darker, given the film’s period lighting.) The artist briefly forgets he’s in art not business and bets his future on the tulip market. 

Of course there are other fevers than just the tulip. The minor one is the drunk’s helplessness before temptation, even when conducting that serious mission. A creature of appetite, he eats the bulb on which so many characters’ fates depend.

The other primary fever is love, which drives both young men into ruinous careers. So intense are the relationships that out of desperation Maria threatens to expose her dear and close mistress Sophia in order to save herself. Sophia spurns the doctor who offers to help her provide his husband’s heir. But to enable her escape with the artist she concocts the complex plot to pass Maria’s baby off as her own and to feign death. 

The film departs from the genre in its happy endings. None of the key characters die here. Sandvort, ashamed and defeated, bequeaths his house to Maria and makes a new fortune and family in the West Indies. 

The two young men also thrive, once they abandon their delusion of easy wealth. The fishmonger becomes master of the Sandvort estate. The artist achieves fame for his art. From sketching his nude lover he advances to a commission in the church — where he learns Sophia did not die after all but became a nun. Sophia realized she could not go through with her indulgent escape, nor could she return to the loving and betrayed Sandvort. So she returns to her original home, the convent. 

Love conquers all after all. As the abbess remarks, stories don't end; they just diverge. A painting freezes a moment in time. We read into it what may have led up to its composition and what we may deduce will ensue. But film continues through time, so it affords the grace of these happy resolutions. 
     The script shows Tom Stoppard’s usual level of intellectual ambition and clarity. There are also flashes of his wit. “What will you bid,” one man asks after an auction. “Farewell.” “Is that necessary?” Maria asks Dr Sorgh when he prepares to explore up her skirts. “Not really. Force of habit.” Hence Sophia’s return.